Tag: singularity

Just make sure you’ve got a firm hold on your hats because shit is getting REAL.

The rate of technological advancement is increasing, exponentially. For those of you as mathematically inept as I am, just look at the pretty picture. See how the long goes *jooooooooop* …that’s the point in question.

The problem with all of us plebs is that we are thinking linear, we see the future of things moving at the same pace as they have done… a nice comfortable gait. It’s not going to stay that way. Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns, which is a nicer way of saying watch your fucking back pal because it’s alllll coming for you. All of it. On its way. In a hurry.

So the current thinking in AI is to develop a computer that can learn, and motivate it’s own advancement. And once that can be done, theoretically, the machine would be able to set itself on a course to increase its own intelligence. Following that, our comparatively gnat-like brains lose all control over their progression. We are sidelined while these super-intelligent beings, now entirely autonomous, just do their super-intelligent thing.

Here’s where it gets crazy. All these people, these genius people that are talking about it, what they’re saying is after this goes down they just don’t fucking know. Could be that the machines decide that humans, being what we are (life sucking leaches with a tendency for the depraved) are a threat to their environment. And maybe they just go about exterminating us. Could be that our new overlords are wonderfully benevolent and they do the Johnny Depp-in-that-AI-movie-thing, fix the environment, sort the hunger and the disease and the rest of it and everyone’s lives are infinitely improved. There may even be a middle ground between those two highly melodramatic scenarios.

The kicker, really, is that they’re all just shrugging their shoulders going iiiunoooo. While we hurtle towards this tipping point where things become entirely out of our control and everyone’s just like iiunnnnooooo….. Have your eyes bugged out of your head yet? Push em back in then… and hear this. Kurzweil predicts that this will happen around 2040. TWENTY FUCKING FORTY. And he rarely gets it wrong. But some are saying earlier. I’ll hold the vomit bucket while you lose your lunch.

“The transport industry in the US employs about 3 million people, extrapolating world wide thats about 70 million jobs at a a minimum.” These jobs are already all but done for because autos are ALREADY BETTER DRIVERS THAN US. By all accounts they don’t feel the need to just-really-quickly-check if they received any Instagram likes while at the wheel. And probably won’t insist on opening the windows so everyone else can enjoy their Techno Jams of Summer playlist. This may be beside the point.

While it may be further away, it is also significant to note that your pearly white collar will not protect you from the bots for long.

“The cutting edge of programming isn’t super smart programmers writing bots, its super smart programmers writing bots that teach themselves to do things the programmers could never teach them to do.” This notion is exactly what governs the principles of the predicted intelligence explosion which will foreshadow the singularity. And it is exactly why we are all struggling to imagine that the clunky robots and machines we see now will soon learn and imagine and create in ways we never could. Once this shit hits it’s going to snowball rapid-fire. The current system CANNOT EXIST under these conditions.